'No, it is something more.'

'Are you sure? You wouldn't be the first human being whom the Ent.i.ty has spoken to in this way.'

'But She does not really speak to me.''In truth? Then where do Her words come from when you hear them inside of you?'

'How can I really know? Where does the wind come from? Where does it go?'

'But your consciousness, itself-'

'You can't understand such things by such simple a.n.a.lysis, you know.' She stared at him long and deeply. 'You wonder where my consciousness comes from. Does it come from the atoms of my brain? Or from the planet on which we stand? Or does it come from the moon-brains of the Ent.i.ty? Impossible questions, I think. You really might do better to wonder where your own beautiful consciousness comes from.'

'Perhaps, but I-'

'These thoughts,' she said, 'are coming into my mind as my lips begin to move.

These words are coming into my mouth. I am speaking, Danlo; She does not speak to me.'

He thought about this for a moment, and then persisted, 'But it would be only natural if She did, yes? She made you of the elements of this earth in a way, you are a child of Her body.'

As he said this, she continued staring at him, and he thought it disturbing the way her eyes were as dark as the empty s.p.a.ces between the stars. And yet, strangely, they were also full of light.

'I am not Her child, Danlo.'

'What are you, then?'

'Just what you have said I am: something other. And something more.'

'Tamara, you-'

'That is not my name,' she said. Her voice grew cold and deep as the sea. 'That is not who I really am.'

'Are you not? Who are you, then ... truly?'

Whether by chance or design, she stood with her back to the sun so that the light framed her head and hair like a fiery golden halo. It was hard for Danlo to look at her.

She stood perfectly still, looking at him for a long time. And then she said, 'I am She.'

Danlo shook his head and used his hand to shield his eyes against the burning sunlight. 'No, no,' he said softly.

'I am the one you know as the Solid State Ent.i.ty.'

'That... is hard to believe.'

'You know who I really am. You have known it for some time.'

Danlo looked at her dark and bottomless eyes blazing at the centre of her brilliant face. At last he said, 'Yes, this is true in some way I have known this since the moment I first saw you. But it is still hard to believe.'

'She and I are one. There is nothing in me that is not a part of Her; there is no part of Her that is unknown to me.'

'But... how is that possible?'

'How is it not possible? How is it possible that human beings wander the worlds of their births their entire lives and never know a single moment of connection with a mind greater than their own?'

'I do not know.'

She stepped closer to him, and again she took his hands in hers. 'I've said that I am the Ent.i.ty, and so I am. And I've said that I'm not Her child, nor am I the woman you know as Tamara. But this is not entirely true. What I should have said is that I am not only Her child. I am not only Tamara Ten Ashtoreth.'

'But Tamara, if you are not only you, then-'

'I have something of a triune nature,' she said, almost laughing. 'You may think of me as the Mother, the Daughter, and the Unholy Ghost the ghost of Tamara's mem- ories that are really your own.'This playful and rather arcane reference to the three main G.o.ds of the Kristian sects was not lost on Danlo, who had once been a student of ancient religions. Despite the seriousness of all that had occurred during the last day and night, he smiled and laughed softly. But then, after contemplating the mystery of what she had told him, his face fell thoughtful and grave.

'Why?' he asked. "You are the test of me, I think. This love we almost had. This life. If you if the Ent.i.ty only wanted to test me this way, then why not create a Tamara who had no shared consciousness with the Ent.i.ty? She could have made any woman any woman in the form of Tamara and then simply read her mind. It would have been an easier thing to do, yes?'

She was silent while she closed her eyes. She seemed both troubled and deeply desirous of searching for an answer that would satisfy him. Looking at her this way, with her lovely face so full of compa.s.sion and vulnerability, Danlo could hardly think of her as anything other than human.

'Because,' she said. 'Because if She is to accomplish Her purpose, any child of Hers must be the same in the soul. This is the reason Her memories and Her mind are in me. Otherwise all my experiences and apprehension of reality would seem as alien to Her as that of any other human being.'

'What is Her purpose, then? What could She hope to know through you that she could not know otherwise?'

She squeezed his hands so hard that they hurt. And then she said, 'The Ent.i.ty wanted to know who you really are,' she said. 'We needed to know.'

This response astonished Danlo, who half-shouted, 'But why? The Ent.i.ty read my mind once I presume she still can.'

'There are different ways of knowing, Danlo.'

'But why this way?' he asked. He pulled his hands free from hers and touched her forehead, her face, her shimmering hair, and then he traced his fingers around the curve of her naked shoulder. 'Why you, at all, then?'

In answer to this, she ran her own finger across the scar on his forehead. And then she told him, 'I was born to touch and feel. From the moment I stepped out of the tank, I knew I had to touch the whole world. To walk the earth again, naked as a newborn child, to feel the sand beneath my feet. To taste the salt of the sea. To touch, to taste, to perceive, to suffer all the senses. To feel, to move, to become what I am.

To live, Danlo. To live and live and live again. How can anyone ever have enough life? Or love? I've always wanted so much love. To want to love so badly I could die, all the while knowing I'd do anything rather than die because then there would be no hope for love or anything else. And love is everything, you know. To touch the world, in love, as lovers touch to watch this love wake everything up even though it all hurts almost more than anything can bear. Only, there's something that you once told me. That pain is the awareness of life. There's so much pain, isn't there? Pain inside pain, and it just goes on and on and never stops. But pain doesn't really matter, does it? I think I'd suffer any pain just to live and be a part of this marvellous awakening.

I'd suffer anything if only I could touch your beautiful face and feel what it's like to love and be loved. I'd burn and burn and burn to feel your eyes touching mine the way I remember. This is why I am, you know. I'd touch the sun itself if it loved me the way that you once did.'

Love, the courtesans say, is the simplest thing in the universe. There was a moment when Danlo looked at her standing all naked and golden beneath the morning sun.

There was a moment of touching, when she pressed her hand against his face as if she wanted to catch and hold the teardrops that were almost burning his eyes. There was a moment when he could never love her in the way in which she wanted to be loved, and then, a simple moment later, he was falling into love as inescapably as a stone falls into a star.

'The test continues, yes?' He tried to smile, and he said, 'Is this my test, then? To see how much pain I can endure?'

Pain is the awareness of life, he remembered. And then a new thought. Pain is the fullness of love.

She came up to him and kissed his lips. Then she told him, 'Your tests are over now. This is your reward.'

'My reward?'

'To love again, if that's what you'll allow yourself to do.'

'Is this how you capture me without breaking my soul?'

'We could love each other almost forever, you know.'

'No, no please.'

'We could marry each other. Here, on the beach beneath this beautiful sun we could begin a marriage that would last a thousand years. Isn't this what you've always wanted?'

'To marry, yes. But to marry now, to marry you how can I do this?'

She smiled at him and asked, 'How can you not? We'll marry and mate and make children together.'

'Tamara, Tamara, I-'

'A new race, you know. Our children would be the first truly human beings. We would teach them how to be human and something more.'

'Our children,' he said, considering this. 'Our blessed children.'

'All our children someday we would have millions of children and grandchildren.

We could fill the whole world with what we create.'

'I have ... always dreamed of having children. You know that I have.'

'You've also dreamed of a world without war or evil. A world restored to its original harmony and beauty to what you once called halla.'

'I have ... always wondered if such a dream is possible.'

'The whole world, Danlo. We could make it as we will.'

The whole world.

He looked east beyond the beach at the forest blazing bright green in the strong early light. There were beautiful birds in the forest, and flowers and tigers. It was all so pristine and almost perfect. No man, he thought, had ever walked through this forest. And the trees themselves the glorious redwoods and spruce and hemlock had never known the touch of any man's eyes save his own. He wondered if the trees were only waiting for him to fill the forest with his children. Did these silent trees long for the love of human beings who would worship them as G.o.ds? No, he thought.

The trees were only trees. They danced almost motionlessly all day in the sunlight, and their millions of long needles shimmered in emerald ecstasy. Their awareness was of photons and water and perhaps the carbon dioxide of his breath, but they had little care for his pa.s.sions or plans.

'I had thought my reward for surviving the tests was to be the answer to three questions.' He turned to smile at Tamara, who was standing patiently in the sun.

'You may have your answer to your questions. Or you may have me.'

'But not both?'

'No, not both. It's your choice, you know.'

Even though it hurt to keep his eyes fixed in her direction, Danlo could not help looking at her. 'How can I make such a choice?'

'How can you not?'

'How can you make me ... make this choice?''Oh, Danlo, Danlo I've offered you myself, the whole world. What is there to choose?'

The whole world.

Danlo looked southward down the beach where the dune gra.s.ses rippled in the wind. Some kind of spider must have woven her web between the strands of gra.s.s, for not far from him a lovely silken orb sparkled like silver and diamonds with the early morning dew. There were sandpipers hopping across the sand, and nearer the water, the gulls and the kittiwakes were gliding through the air. The whole beach was teeming with life, and it was a mystery to him how he could ever choose the answer to three questions over the chance to walk this beautiful beach for as long as he lived.

'If I did remain here,' he asked, 'how long would we really have together before we were destroyed? You have said that the Silicon G.o.d's attacks upon the Ent.i.ty are concentrated upon this Earth.'

Tamara smiled coldly, ruthlessly, and she said, 'Do you think I would let Him destroy what I've created? Do you think I would let him harm my children?'

'I suppose not,' he said. 'I remember that you ... would destroy Him first.'

'Of course I would, but I promise that no part of this world would be touched by our battles. You would never know that He and I made war.'

'And I would remain safe beneath the splendid sky while the G.o.ds shattered s.p.a.cetime and all the stars, yes?'

'Is it so terrible to be safe for a while?'

He kicked at the sand and ignored her question. 'I would be safe to remembrance the Elder Eddas, yes? To remembrance the secret of how the Silicon G.o.d might be defeated?'

'Is it such a terrible thing to remembrance this?'

'Yes, truly, it is terrible,' he said. 'War is always terrible, I think.'

'But it wouldn't be you who waged war, Danlo.'

'Who would it be then? You?'

'I, of course, but not I. Did you forget so soon that I have a multiple nature? It would be She who warred. In some ways, she's really a terrible G.o.ddess, you know, and She loves war.'

Danlo was quiet while he ground the toe of his wet boot into the sand. And then he asked, 'And you? What do you love, then?'

'I love love,' she said. She put her arms around him and embraced him. She pressed her head touching the side of his face while she whispered in his ear. 'I love the sky and the trees and the wind. I love you.'

He held her touching him while he ran his fingers along her smoothly muscled back. He held her tightly, almost fiercely, and he felt how good it was to be close to her in this way. Her hair smelled of sea salt and sun good, clean smells that he would never forget even if he must someday leave this world. But holding her as he did, with her heart beating so close to his and the breath of her life rushing like a faint wind in his ear, he did not know how he could ever leave her. He looked over her shoulder northward where the mountains rose up and touched the sky. He thought that it would be good to hold her beneath these misty mountains almost forever as long as there were mountains, till the wind and rain eroded them a million years from now and washed them as sand into the sea.

The whole world.

He suddenly broke away from her to face west toward the sea. It was a cold, clear day and there was a hint of winter in the air. Beyond the offsh.o.r.e rocks, a flock of migrating terns beat their way south to warmer lands. And farther out, almost as far as the horizon, a lone albatross glided along the wind very high in the sky. The ocean was moving as it always did, and he listened to the sound of the cold, deep, blue waters. He watched the great autumn swell rolling in from the open ocean and breaking into sets of white-capped waves as it neared the sh.o.r.e. With the sun slanting low off the water, the whole world shimmered with light. In the face of this impossible beauty, he was very close to agreeing to marry Tamara and remain here forever. And then he remembered that he had once taken vows as a pilot. He remembered that he had made promises that he must not break. He even remembered his aspiration to become an asarya and all his other dreams, and he stared at the sea so long without moving or blinking that his eyes began to burn. Words, he thought. All my vows and promises are only words. What were mere words against the marvel of the world that lay before him? How could words ever touch him and bring him love as would this beautiful woman waiting so patiently by his side? Words were nothing, he realized, and yet all the words that he had ever spoken stood for something, and he could not forget this. He could not forget the tribes of his people dying halfway across the galaxy on the frozen islands west of Neverness. And he could never forget the real Tamara, she of the lost memories and golden soul who must dwell somewhere among the stars. In a shimmering moment of remembrance, as he stared and stared at the motionless sea, his whole life came back to him and rushed into his consciousness like an ocean. This was the moment of choice and decision, the terrible moment of his true test. It was a test, he thought, that the Ent.i.ty had not consciously designed. Life itself was testing him. Fate was testing him. Or perhaps it was only he who was testing himself.

'Please tell me you'll stay with me,' Tamara said.

There was a moment when the whole world was as frozen and still as the deep winter sea, and then a moment later all was crashing waves and sunlight and seabirds crying out to each other in hunger and love.

'Yes, I will stay with you' he was as close to saying these simple words as the beating of his heart. He wanted to say this almost as badly as he wanted to hold Tamara close to him and feel her sweet breath touching his forever. Instead, he turned to her and told her, 'I am sorry. I ... must go.'

Because he could not bear to look at her just then, he began studying the lines of his lightship and calculating how long it would take him to dig it free of sand. The diamond hull, he saw, remained unmarked by the elements of this world, and it glistened all black and beautiful as it always had.

'Oh, Danlo, Danlo,' she said.

He could hardly bear the immeasurable sadness with which these words were weighted, though it surprised him that her voice remained calm and unbroken.

'I am sorry,' he repeated. 'But if my tests are done, I must go.'